


Killing Buddha

by Spylace



Series: Odachi [4]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 20:18:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15736623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: This is the story of a man who fell in love with the one he shouldn’t and lived long enough to see him die.





	Killing Buddha

_“If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. Only live your life as it is, not bound to anything.” – Linji_

 

 

Hibari doesn’t know how the conversation starts—Yamamoto has an odd talent for springing the most damning questions, the most memorable of which was when he decided to ask if daemons could become human. All he remembers is that they had been lazing in the grass, soaking up the last bit of sunlight before winter set in, their book bags piled between them and their uniforms gone damp. Chilled, even with Tamizuki tucked under one arm, he had allowed himself to drift. He barely starts when Yamamoto spoke, his movements lazy as he tugs at his daemon’s ear.

“Should I? Buddha sounds like a nice guy.”

“From the mouth of babes...”

Tamizuki chuckles drowsily, rattling her quills as though to fend off sleep. Obligingly, Hibari lifts his arm and sits up, disgruntled to find grass stain on his sleeves. In contrast, Yamamoto seems unperturbed, almost cheerful as he stretches the cottony fabric around his arm and holds it there for Koujiro to inspect.

Hibari stares at them amused and says, “Hn, children always have interesting to say.”

Which led to giggled protests and companiable silence until Yamamoto asks,

“Would you kill Buddha?”

He smiles,

“Why not?”

 

Hibari Kyouya is born May 5th, 1989 to the second wife of a second son, three male cousins preceding him and one half-sister, another on the way whom, with luck, will turn out to be a boy. Moments later, he is joined by a tiny naked thing, enough wrinkles on her skin to rival the legion of Shar Pei at his grandmother’s command. Surrounded by his family members, he is branded with his mother’s maiden name because he is a bastard child, a worthless child, and an unlawful child.

His father and his daemon are off in the wind, drinking and whoring and perhaps setting themselves up for a third wife. It is a disgrace to their name and the entire family seethes in silent disapproval. But a man distracted is a man less likely to plot murders. Muratori Hideki is many things; charming, handsome, intelligent and ambitious but being patient is not one of his finer qualities and it is his blatant desire to usurp his older brother and his band of motley boys that gets him killed two years later.

And as Hibari takes the first few breaths in the world of living, his grandfather thoughtlessly comments that it is a pity that he was not born to the first son or even the first wife instead. But his mother sees him as a sign of divine favor when he is expelled from her womb in a gush of blood and fluids. She holds him in her arms, away from the lazy eyes of the family and the three solemn-faced cousins who would have killed him had they known what was coming. Brushing her hand against his fine brow and the tightly clenched mouth, she promises him the world and the future of the clan.

They take him away after that.

Hibari is raised as a spare, a bastard with no ties and no names to claim but his own. His daemon is nameless, close to nonexistence. But he calls her ‘Tamizuki’ because she is beautiful in all forms, has real teeth to bite with, feet with poisoned spurs, prickly spines when she refuses to be touched. From his first words to the first awkward steps, they consider themselves separate—Kyouya and Tamizuki rather than KyouyanadTamizuki as with his father and the pied magpie, his stepmother and the shaggy-haired pug, his half-sister and the still-shifting daemon.

When his father dies, his uncle collects everything from the sour-faced first wife to the ghost of her stillborn yoked to her neck. The sickly niece, only thirteen, is promised to a young official with a hand in imports and exports. But Hibari, Hibari he sends away because he is not family. Had he been older, more useful, his daemon settled and named, he might have been sold to slavery, to the red-light district and the decadence of sin.

Instead, he is passed from family member to family member and at one point, nursed by a whore on his grandfather’s lap. By the time he is seven, he has gone through a succession of foster families—grunts like Ito, second lieutenant Kimura and his mandarin duck Bijyou who never failed to make Tamizuki smile, Murata who taught them how to fight, and Yamamoto Mayuu, a rising star in their secretive and violent family.

The Yamamotos are a family of assassins, a clan in name only, foundlings of witch mothers and absent fathers. Elsewhere, they might have ruled entire nations by themselves. But in the empire of the rising sun, their fangs dulled and their claws curbed, they are strangely complacent and docile. They do not care about the inheritance game of the Muratori family as long as they are paid, as long as they can keep some semblance of peace in the dark niche of their world with their lives intact.

Some of the darkest rumors about them are that they are children of mothers and sons. Obviously, most of them are men. It surprises him when a woman picks him up, a cigarette hanging from the side of her lips and her hair teased a burnished red. She squints through her shades as though the sunlight hurts her. Hibari wouldn’t have been surprised.

Yamamoto Mayuu, his latest guardian, smokes like a chimney on fire as she drives them back to her house. She slams down on the accelerator in between cameras and speedometers perched on top of traffic lights. Tamizuki scrambles to grab purchase in the seat of his pants. Her tiny nails dig into his thighs and draw blood. Hibari barely flinches. In the passenger seat, Susumu the rooster-shaped daemon observes them with cool yellow eyes.

“Hail Muratori.” She mutters sarcastically, lighting up a second cigarette. “So how old are you kid? Can you speak? God I thought you’d be taller.”

“I thought you’d be a man.”

The woman smiles graciously and makes a swift turn. Tamizuki crashes against a window before assuming the form of a red-eyed gecko. “A proper bird already aren’t you. What was boss fucking thinking? He should have just killed you and Kikyo when you were born.”

Hibari stiffens at her crude language. The twin looks of scorn and pity aren’t knew but the barely disguised contempt is. By the laws of predetermined civility vested in the members of the Japanese society from ages three and up, Hibari and Tamizuki have never been so much as cursed at—not even by the enterprising young brothers who dyed their hair in increasingly outrageous colors for fun. But the breach in conduct isn’t what captures his attention; it’s his mother, whom, for all intents and purposes, has been erased from the history of the Muratori clan.

“You knew our mother?”

“Arguable isn’t it? Everyone knew Kikyo one way or another. Some say she didn’t know what she was getting into. Others say that she was a witch.”

“And you?”

Susumu swells like a fat toad. In their defense, they are only seven. The rooster’s human counterpart merely chews on the end of her cigarette like a wad of tobacco. A disgusting habit—Tamizuki adds, twitching her antennae.

“Insolence” the other daemon rebukes before subsiding.

Mayuu flashes him a tender look.

“I knew she was a fool, trying to birth the next leader of the Muratori family.”

 

Yamamoto Mayuu will never be a maternal woman—that much is evident even in the car seat breathing into second hand smoke. Often, she leaves Hibari and Tamizuki at a derelict hardware store where her brother Tsuyoshi lives with his four-year-old son and a drug ring at the back. The shop is never open and from the outside, it looks like an operation gone to seed. But man swears up and down that when he’s amassed enough money and grace, he will settle here and open the first sushi shop in Namimori.

Hibari does not know what to make of this strange dream but Yamamoto Tsuyoshi’s enthusiasm is infectious and never fails to rile his son in to drumming his fists on the shiny counters. Takeshi is three years younger than him, his eyes as bright and guileless as the day is long. After so many years of lies and intrigues, they are startling in their clarity and innocence.

The first time they meet, Koujiro shifts into a red-crowned kestrel for the occasion. Takeshi lowers his eyes like he has been taught though Hibari is only a bastard child, no chance of succession or grants for special favors. But the other boy has never wanted him for anything more than a brother, a playmate and a friend. It is entirely too easy to mistake him as sheep, mobbed whenever he is dropped off at a playground. But being surrounded makes it easier for him to hunt them down. At times, he forgets that domesticated canines still had teeth.

He picks at the plate of tuna, experiments that Tsuyoshi works on in between cutting up people for a living. Bored with his failed endeavors into the music industry, Takeshi stares at the slices of pink flesh and reaches for them with his dirty fingers. Tamizuki is on him in a second, her dun beak cutting the back of the other boy’s hand.

Hibari predicts that the boy will cry and is surprised when he doesn’t. Takeshi pouts for a full minute instead and lets Koujiro lick away the droplets of blood. The wolf pup scowls, radiating disapproval. Tsuyoshi ignores them and Sayuri, his turtle daemon, smiles in her slow and affectionate way.

“Aren’t you going to cry?” His daemon asks in her matter-of-fact way, giving voice to the words that Hibari doesn’t bother saying out loud. Takeshi stares at them for a second, cocking his head as Koujiro crawls over his head and places his paws on the four points of his skull.

“I won’t cry.” he answers slowly, his brows creasing. His expression brightens as he leaps off his stool, clumsily managing to land on his feet instead of his scabbed knees. “’Cause ‘Jiro can’t!”

“I don’t need to cry.” The daemon sniffs, offended.

Belatedly, Hibari realizes that Koujiro should be female, just like Tamizuki is female and Sayuri is female. But Hibari Kyouya is only seven years old going on eight. He doesn’t know why people on the streets sometimes stare at Takeshi funny when he introduces himself and his daemon. Why Koujiro is male when he should be, like everyone else, the opposite sex of his human half.

They never talk about mothers.

They don’t talk about this either.

 

Hibari starts school in the middle of the year. All of his classmates have parents who love them, siblings who look out for them and relatives who bring them sweets and cakes in the wonderfully loud cellophane wrapping which gives their poor teacher no small amount of migraines. Instead, Hibari has Mayuu who pollutes the air with her pack-a-day habit while waiting for him next to the swings like some delinquent Yank, Tsuyoshi who is gentle and kind but too young and jaded to be a father to either of the boys under his care. He has Tamizuki who can watch his back and fend for herself for when he can’t and he has Takeshi who clings to him like a four-legged octopus and his daemon Koujiro who howls in time with the school bell.

When a girl in class jeers at them through the open window, the softly curved back to the slumped shoulders and arms that barely swing up and down, Tamizuki bites her daemon hard enough to draw blood and send her screaming. The boys shriek in delight at the spectacle while the girl’s suitor comes bristling forward to her aid. Their teacher, a kindly young woman with barely a hairbreadth of Mayuu’s faults and personality manages to separate them before neighboring teachers are called.

The girl’s daemon beats a hasty retreat against the roof of a dog daemon’s mouth, too frightened to come out. Hibari and Tamizuki are called to the office and made to sit still while the principal makes calls to his house. Later, Tsuyoshi comes to pick them up even though it is Mayuu’s turn; he’d specifically told his sister in the morning that he had a job uptown.

Tsuyoshi takes them out for ice cream and doesn’t mention the girl Tamizuki left in tears nor the daemon who had to have his iridescent shell pieced back together with glue. They spend their day at the park watching young women push a bright array of pastel-colored strollers forward. Admittedly, he is glad that Takeshi isn’t here to witness his fall from grace.

This is it then—Tamizuki murmurs dully, we won’t see Namimori again.

Quietly, Hibari hugs her close as she curls into a beady-eyed ferret in his arms.

“Kids are quite imaginative you know.” Tsuyoshi says suddenly, folding his wrapper into perfect rectangles. “Takeshi can create entire cities out of an interesting looking rock. I guess it helps that he’s that age.” He sighs, leaning back against the park bench as he ran a calloused hand through Hibari’s hair. Hibari wrinkles his nose and moved out of the man’s reach, Tamizuki curious and feline against his thin shoulder. Sayuri makes a sound that could have been suppressed laughter. It’s an interesting sound; the turtle daemon never talks much. “What I’m trying to say is, there are ways other than trying to bite someone to death. Be good Hibari, I won’t let you off so easily next time.”

 

He is only eleven when Tamizuki settles, a crested porcupine who tartly remarks that better now while they know. She is too heavy and spined for him to carry but sits on his lap in consolation, their dreams of taking over the Muratori family washed away like generic soap bubbles. Tsuyoshi takes the day off to sit with him, not asking questions—never asking questions.

“It is not our place to ask” Sayuri says gently. Hibari wishes that it was.

Koujiro is in a constant motion of feathers, fur and skin as though Tamizuki’s settling is a contagion he has yet to catch. Takeshi, bemused, simply looks hurt.

“Nothing’s changed.” she barks sharply.

Takeshi nods and accepts.

“Oh okay”

Later he thinks this might be the point Takeshi decides not to settle.

 

When he enters Namimori Junior High School, he has the disciplinary committee whipped and under his command within a matter of minutes. Having heard of his reputation throughout primary school, the members hardly bother to resist. He also recruits a boy named Sasagawa Ryohei who is slow, undisciplined and noisy but has potential.

Takeshi joins him in his final year as the baby-faced prodigy of the baseball team. Tsuyoshi never misses a single game and Hibari sometimes joins him despite the noise pollution. He always smiles bright when he notices the senior’s presence, Koujiro flashing a victory dance in the air. There is a minor incident with a freshman named Tsunayoshi and another student but is smoothed away when they all move to different schools. The younger boy seems disturbed for a while, wrong-footed and Hibari sets him to work patrolling the fields and the locker rooms during afterhours.

Remarkably, despite his bleeding heart, Yamamoto proves to be an excellent hunter.

 

Mukuro is young enough to be in school but enrolled in none. He travels with a ragtag group of young witches and boy, one less daemon to their number, brazenly encroaching on his territory. Takeshi seems fascinated; the strange teen carries around daggers, weapons which are not allowed on the school grounds. It is a welcome break in the monotony.

The other teen is strong, or at least strong enough to repel his initial strike. His daemon, a gunmetal grey snake, taunts that Hibari and Tamizuki will lose.

He claims to have seen the future in the water and vows to destroy the will of Vongola before it is made. Hibari does not care for wild ramblings. His scope is limited to his territory and his alone. The outside world, as long as it keeps away, holds no interest for him. It will be a weakness in the days to come, the lack of ambition towards expansion. Other times, it will become his greatest strength. He knows where he stands. That is more than what most people believe.

Their fight takes place on the rooftops where hundreds of students have gathered below instead of attending class. Later, he will bite them all to death but for now, Mukuro stands in front of him offensive to the eyes Takeshi and Sasagawa burst through the doors, their daemons close at their heels. Immediately, Koujiro flies into action, intent on stopping the fight.

For a brief moment, his heart stops as he is thrown off the rooftop.

He always thought that the bond between him and Tamizuki was stronger.

 

There is blood in his mouth not his own. It tastes sweet and sour, oddly bitter with a salty aftertaste. Hibari stirs, finding Takeshi and Koujiro piled on top of him barely alive. The former breathes red foam into the green-lit canopies; the latter stares at him with glassy eyes, throat fluttering like a dancing butterfly.

Instinctively, Hibari reaches out to find his other half gone. Not quiet nor sulky in a petulant spell but disappeared as though she had never existed. He was eleven when she settled, precocious but confident in her stocky frame. She earned him ridicule by being a land beast instead of a bird that would have proven his right of succession to the Muratori family. But she is a part of him and has been with him forever.

With a hoarse cry, he lashes out against the unholy tangle of boy and daemon pressing him to the trees. Takeshi yelps like a struck dog, lurching sideways in their nest of leaves. Likewise, Koujiro flaps his ruined wings unable to fly, land-bound as much as Tamizuki is with his talons hooked deep inside his human half. By chance, Hibari’s hands brush against the wet spots on the younger teen’s back, gouges rooted to the eagle-shaped avatar. He recognizes that the boy and his daemon are injured and will probably die in his arms. But he continues to struggle until Koujiro spreads his wings and hides them from learning. And like a falcon jessed, Hibari falls quiet, his pulse racing as he quietly listens for the shapes behind the barbed feathers.

Electricity flickers up and down his temples like being licked by a livewire. Koujiro is touching him, another daemon is touching him and Tamizuki is nowhere to be found. If he had been the type to indulge, he would have broken down in hysterics. But he listens when the daemon opens his yellow mouth and lets out a shrill cry, his voice shockingly loud, words spilling out that are not words, sounds with no specific meanings attached to them, feelings they had now laid to bare.

Hibari touches him back.

‘We were too weak.’

Koujiro’s talons sheared through the shoulder muscles and their connecting nerves. It is a sheer miracle that he did not sever the spine. But Takeshi smiles at him after, drugged to the gills with his skin too tender to the touch. The doctors tell him that Takeshi will never play again. Tsuyoshi says nothing; Hibari thinks that it might have been better if he had.

Tamizuki grieves for them both and clambers onto his lap, burying her face in a mess of towels. She is missing patches of quills here and there, lost to the unsuspecting herbivores while they watched their human counterparts scurry about, pointing at the two boys stuck in the trees.

Takeshi rests on his stomach, Koujiro sitting near the window bathed in moonlight. Neither stirs when Tamizuki leans close, though they keep separate as though it will prevent the daemon from ever hurting the boy again. He holds his breath as his daemon hooks her claws into the sheets, almost afraid to touch. But he needs to know and they both need to know that Yamamoto Takeshi is someone precious, someone worth protecting.

The other teen is warm and alive, like a handful of thumbtacks squeezed against his heart. Across the room, Koujiro, an iridescent dragonfly, lets out an all too human sigh.

 

Surprisingly, it is Yamamoto Mayuu who figures out the inner workings of a teenage boy’s mind. The steely-eyed woman who had been assigned to him at the age of seven. She had never been the perfect guardian, always smoking, cursing, plotting and fighting. How she had ever managed to land a husband he has no idea. They have no children and if her husband has thoughts towards any, he doesn't voice it out loud. It is probably the smartest course of action. But it is Mayuu who stands in front of ward 303, short and heavy-set; her hair teased a burnished red.

They retreat to the rooftop, a sanctity none would dare break if they know him at all. It is seven o’ clock in the evening and the sun is barely beginning to set, the saffron horizon dying Susumu’s feathers a brilliant red and casts artificial warmth into his deadened gaze.

“My brother is a moron.” She says finally, sticking a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and balancing it on her lower lip. “He thinks you’re just kids.” Her rooster daemon nods to emphasize her point. “You’re not.”

Hibari remains silent as she continues, unconcerned if he chooses to listen or not.

“They say that the world is made up of two kinds of people, the thinkers and the doers. In the Yamamoto clan, women are the thinkers. The men on the other hand,” She rolls a shoulder, distended skin gathering in folds around her neck. Her appearance of an herbivore is an illusion, just like Mukuro is. His hair stands on end and Tamizuki shuffles closer, unable to be apart after the traumatic events of that afternoon. “They do as they are asked. We live to kill and serve.”

Mayuu lights up her cigarette. “You have a choice Boss-lite, stay in Namimori or finish what you’ve started with the Muratori. Maybe someday you can get both. But if they ever find out that you’re a fucking queer...”

Impatiently he demands, “Why does it matter?”

“It’s like your mother said—you will be the next head of the Muratori family. You will prosper. Family, Hibari, rubbing two dicks together don’t make much of anything except a mess and not the kind you want either.” Tamizuki bristles but Mayuu plows on, “Make no mistakes, Takeshi will feature in your story one way or another. But not in your bed, never.”

He must have looked exceedingly pitiful for Susumu to ignore him without a comment, even when he had a tonfa held against his guardian’s broad cheekbone.

“You can’t stop us.”

“He won’t go with you.” She says triumphantly.

Uncharacteristically, his daemon snipes,

“Why? Was that in your vision as well?”

Mayuu lifts an eyebrow in mock surprise.

“What makes you think I saw anything at all?”

 

Hibari is seventeen and he has never wanted anything more in his life. Mornings are spent in the boys’ locker room, quietly beating off before the school comes to life. He no longer sleeps in the small bedroom on the second floor, the shared space smelling too deeply of Takeshi and Koujiro. He can still taste the iron on his lips spill down his throat if he tries, his grip almost cruel as he comes across the cold tiles.

“Would you kill Takeshi?” Tamizuki says out loud, her words a puff of mist in the cold air. They are sitting on the rooftop thinking—or sulking as Koujiro would gleefully say—where he stares at the broken line of fencing, unrepaired though there have been tentative attempts during council meetings. Hibari will not allow it; it serves as a reminder. “Would you be able to kill Takeshi?”

He has no answer. Graduation looms over him in a space of few weeks. One way or another, they have to leave. They have to cut out the boy-shaped weakness lodged inside them. Below, he can hear the mass chatter of herbivores as they scurry from class, their daemons lumbering after them with the grace of a drunk cat. Briefly he wonders what it might have been like had he been born an herbivore, able to subsidize on uninteresting, unmoving things, if he could have consumed blades of grass and thought it a good life. “I love him, them, both of him.”

Hibari can no longer bring himself to agree.

 

At the age of eighteen, Hibari has become the undisputed heir to the Muratori family. His uncle is only an old man, his precious sons hanged, drawn and quartered by his hands. His half-sister died when her daemon was pinned under a pool of water. Though he is only the second born of a second wife, a spare and a bastard who was never allowed to carry the name in the first place, the elders have no choice but to accept the blue-eyed murderer with a land-bound daemon.

One asks scornfully what of the Muratori when the oyabun cannot fly. He gasps in surprise as bones shift and joints rotate to become wings and feathers. Koujiro fans his wings out gracefully and folds a scaled leg in a formal bow. Hibari raises an eyebrow; he has not seen that particular form since it had carried him and Yamamoto into safety a lifetime ago. Yamamoto winks at his knowing look and declares solemnly,

“Then we will carry his weight with him.”

The elders have no choice but to capitulate.

 

Hibari regrets very little in his life. Even when Yamamoto was captured, he simply turned away despite his daemon, knowing that someday the other man will return like a passerine bird chasing the undiscovered seasons. But he regrets having never learned what matters the most.

“I’m not drunk.” Yamamoto says indomitably sad the last time they touch, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. Hibari only wishes that he were, greeting guests and well-wishers like a hangover. Miura Haru is a beautiful girl and wears her power like a queen. Sasagawa has already had to remind him to at least look as though he wants to be married but the only thing Hibari can think of is how much the sun hurts his eyes.

Afterwards, he asks Mukuro if the other man got what he wanted for with the witch’s withdrawal from the Vongola Famiglia, they have lost three more guardians. Tamizuki sobs, great and heaving like the last time they sent Yamamoto away. They bury him beside his father in the family plot.

In the distance, a bird sings as though waiting for spring.


End file.
